Monday, 8 June 2015

The ability to see the 'bigger picture', the 'whole' person, seems to be the strength of both Osteopathy and Acupuncture.

How perverse the compartmentalization and analytic western scientific (reductionist) paradigm seems, when it comes to healthcare. As the old saying goes 'the whole is always greater than the sum of it's parts.' But to truly understand this, in the patient standing before you, and still, in addition to this right-brain overview, have a rigorous left-brain logic, and in depth knowledge of anatomy, physiology and pathology and clear clinical reasoning process.

Yes, of course, there has to be specialism and expertise in a limited field. Medicine and Healthcare is to vast an arena not to do this. However, for practical benefits, we must not loose sight of the 'whole' person standing before us, body, mind and spirit. The ability to see the 'bigger picture' in this way, the 'whole' person, seems to be the strength of traditional medicine, and here I am thinking of both Osteopathy and Acupuncture. This is borne out by research, as patients identify Osteopathy and/or Acupuncture as helpful in improving quality of life issues, chronic pain, chronic fatigue, and so on. For more on this please see:

We are after all practicing clinicians, not magicians (even though some patients hope that we might be, and these two professions may have blurred at times historically). Words like shamanism are probably best avoided, as it may be counterproductive, and go against the kind of integration and skill in the practice of healthcare that I am advocating, and may not endear us 'marginal' professionals (osteopaths, acupuncturists, naturopaths, herbalists, homeopaths, etc) to the medical mainstream.However, I have always thought that true genius is an integrated approach, a person capable of right-brain intuition and left-brain analysis. True genius, e.g. Carl Jung (who originally trained as a medical doctor, before training with Freud) certainly exhibits this. Something to aspire to perhaps. (I have mentioned other names in earlier blogs). How lucky we are that our kind of medicine and healthcare (osteopathy and acupuncture) is limitless in it's depth and application, and lifelong learning.When John Littlejohn, was asked the question: What are the limits of Osteopathy? He replied 'nobody knows.' Probably the mark of a genius, yet a modest and humble one.